Selling Information Security to the Board

CHAPTER 14: HANDLING OBJECTIONS

The questions and objections phase is a critical phase in any sales process. It’s a good phase. You only get objections if your audience has paid a bit of attention and thought a bit about the issues you’ve raised. So, you should like objections just as much as you like questions. Do not feel or display defensiveness at this point. Welcome questions and objections: they give you the opportunity to better explain areas that your audience may not have fully understood yet.

There is an important technique to handling questions effectively, and that is to ‘ask the question back’, just to make sure that you’ve understood it, to demonstrate that you’re paying attention and, sometimes, to either give yourself time to ...